danah boyd (2026). Social media is now parasocial media. Social Media + Society, 12. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051261437487
Summary
In this anniversary essay for Social Media + Society, danah boyd argues that the platforms once called “social media” have changed so fundamentally over two decades that the label has become a misnomer. Where early-2000s platforms supported reciprocal sociality, identity work, and community-building, contemporary platforms reward scrolling over posting, algorithmically curated and professionally produced content over peer-to-peer exchange, and one-sided attention to influencers over mutual friendship. boyd proposes that scholars deprecate the term “social media” in favor of “parasocial media” to better capture this shift and its consequences for governance, inequality, and digital sociality. Writing as both a longtime participant in coining social-media-era vocabulary and a critic revisiting those choices, she positions the piece as a corrective terminological intervention.
Key Contributions
- Introduces and argues for “parasocial media” as a replacement term for “social media” in the contemporary platform era.
- Provides a first-person historical account of how “social media” emerged and consolidated in the mid-2000s, tracing labels from “social computing” and “social software” through “Web 2.0,” “social network sites,” and “social media.”
- Connects parasocial interaction theory (Horton & Wohl, 1956) to current debates on platform political economy, influencer culture, and enshittification.
- Calls on the field to revise its analytic vocabulary and reframe governance, inequality, and sociality debates accordingly.
Methods
A reflective, historically grounded essay drawing on the author’s two decades of participant-observation, blogging, and consulting in the social media industry. boyd combines conceptual and terminological genealogy with a synthesis of secondary literature across platform studies, influencer studies, parasocial interaction theory, and the political economy of platforms.
Findings
- Posting behavior on major platforms has declined while scrolling dominates user activity.
- Feeds are increasingly populated by professionalized creator and advertiser content rather than peer updates from friends.
- Doctorow’s three-stage “enshittification” framework captures the shift from user-serving to investor-serving platforms, with current platforms in the third stage.
- Algorithmic incentives transformed “creators” into “influencers” producing assetizable content, while ordinary users face privacy, reputational, and social risks that make posting less attractive.
- Parasocial engagement, though emotionally intense, fails to generate reciprocal social fabric and can coexist with loneliness and toxicity.
Connections
boyd’s argument that intimacy on platforms has become one-sided and mediated by influencers speaks directly to work on parasociality and creator relations, most obviously Baym2026-tr. Her enshittification-inflected political economy of platform consolidation and algorithmic incentives connects to platform-infrastructure and governance critiques such as Helmond2026-ll and Bechmann2026-dr, while her concern with the decline of reciprocal sociality and the rise of toxicity and manipulation links to Marwick2026-ss and Bak-Coleman2026-mk.
Podcast
A research-radio episode discusses this paper: 🎧 MP3 · Spotify · Apple Podcasts